Sting vs Ric Flair* The feud that both began and ended WCW. In 1988, these two wrestled at the first Clash of Champions and their on-again, off-again feud carried WCW consistently throughout its entire run. The league was based on this feud and it was the only reliable hot feud no matter how many times the two fought.

Steve Austin vs Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels* The winner of THIS feud won the prize of leading wrestling into the new wrestling boom. It originally started out with Bret vs Michaels wrestling over the IC Title, then spilled over to the world title once Bret won it. Both Bret & Michaels put on two (seperate) incredible matches at WM10 and established their claims to being the top star during this time. This feud eventually got ugly and spilled over into the political Clique run in the mid-90s. All the while at WM12 there was a rising star named Steve Austin, free of political B.S. and ready to make a name for himself.

If you look at the big triangle here, you have the Past, Present, and Future of the WWF (at that time) represented equally. Past (Bret) vs Present (Michaels) vs Future (Austin). Bret beat Austin before he was ready to take over and also to cement his legendary status, Michaels beat Bret to establish himself on top as the #1 guy in the WWF, but Austin eventually rose to the top and ended the battle over who the #1 guy in the WWF really was in the mid-late 90s, launching the success of the last wrestling boom.

Ric Flair vs Hulk Hogan* The leader of the WWF vs the leader of WCW. Flair came to the WWF in 1992, but never got the high profile PPV match with Hogan. Eventually, it went to WCW and was undoubtably handled not as well as the WWF could have handled it, but it was still an incredible feud nonetheless.

Andre vs Hogan* The biggest drawing feud, attendance-wise, in WWF history. It didn't get any bigger than that.

Chris Benoit vs Kevin Sullivan* Anyone who saw the GAB96 match between these two knows just how good it truly was. The end result was art imitating life when Benoit ended up with Sullivan's wife and eventually became the catalyst for Benoit and the Radicalz leaving WCW, casting one of the final blows to the organization.

Sting vs Hollywood Hogan* 18 friggin' months of buildup to the biggest buyrate WCW would ever have (at least, based on a the actual product and no celebrities). This feud carried the nWo angle from the very beginning and represented WCW vs the nWo to its fullest. The result of the big feud, due to bad writing, was the turning point for WCW. Unfortunately.

To its credit, that feud did feature one of the coolest Nitro moments ever:

Savage vs. La Parka. Savage dominates most of the match, until out of literally NOWHERE La Parka hits the Diamond Cutter on Savage and pins him. He then pulls off his mask to reveal that it's DDP underneath!

Of course, I also remember many people writing Rick, Mike and Al, asking if DDP was La Parka in WCW ALL ALONG?!?!

Ditto Sting vs. Hogan, but Goldberg vs. the NWO also helped carry the NWO for a long while as well. And then, again, Big Poppa Pump vs. Goldberg was also one hell of a feud even though it was cut short. Say what you will about the WCW, but they did have some great storylines and feuds before they got dumped in the can. (Why Bischoff had to go so far at attempting to change the organization I still can't understand, and I'm still waiting for Turner to decide there is a market for wrestling on TBS again.)

YES! The La Parka thing made me mark out like a six-year-old schoolgirl, eef you weel. That was wonderful.

After that match, La Parka was jumped by Savage when he came out for his next match. Savage apparently thought that La Parka was DDP in disguise once again. But DDP outsmarted Savage once again, making the save for La Parka.

Then Curt Hennig jumped DDP. Boy, I'll tell ya, anyone who didn't see Hennig's nWo turn coming was either an eternal optimist or a certifiable idiot.

One of my favorite fueds from when I was a kid was Chris Adams versus Terry Taylor. It began in UWF, and then spilled into WCCW - when Taylor asked Adams to come down to the ring so Taylor could apologize, and then proceeded to piledrive him twice.

So Austin vs. McMahon wasn't a feud? They wrestled all of once from what I remember. Plus in the mid-eighties, Hulk Hogan probably had something like 5 Televised matches a year. How often are he and Piper supposed to be able to fight with that schedule?

I also wouldn't be that surprised at all if they worked a ton of House Shows with each other, and even had a one-on-one televised match we aren't remembering.

Moe

Austin vs. McMahon was still played out in the ring, even if they never really wrestled each other that often. McMahon had wrestlers he would send to try to beat Austin, he would interfere in his matches, etc. I don't recall Piper ever being involved in anything like that with Hogan back then.If Piper were managing a wrestler against Hogan or otherwise interferred in a Hogan match, I'd call it a feud, but it didn't play out like that. Heel Piper's biggest feud in the WWF was with Paul Orndorff, with the Hillbillies a close second. I admit he was the most hated guy in the Fed back then, but it wasn't really because of who he was wrestling.

I used to read the mark magazines a lot back then, and it seemed like Hogan's biggest house show feud was with Don Muraco--they wrestled a lot and Muraco even got a countout victory one time.

EDIT--forgot Piper/Snuka--I didn't watch the WWF when that happened, but it was definitely Piper's biggest WWF feud.

Well, I'm a WWF person, though that might soon change. I definitely think that when HHH was a great heel, he'd have classic feuds with almost ANYBODY. My personal faves are HHH-Foley, and HHH-Y2J (Summer, 2000). He was really intense in those feuds, and made them real exciting because of that. My favorite non-HHH feud was definitely Hart-Austin. Stone Cold exposed a side of Bret I never seen before, and it was never boring. A close contender could be Mankind-UT, because it was longer than I expected, and it was the first time someone had Taker's number. By the way, I never was into the WHAT thing, so thank you Undertaker for taking a stand on Monday, you da MAN!

Austin vs. Bret, for me, is still the feud of the last few years that everything else gets compared to eventually. It had fantastic wrestling, great personalities, a lot of history, character development and what a lot of the recent feuds and angles have lacked, closure (even if it wasn't what they might have initially intended).

Bret goes from a hero fighting to preserve everything he loves about wrestling against someone who symbolizes everything he hates about it (HBK) to embracing everything he opposes when Austin pushes him over the edge. He's driven to the point where he tries to destroy the WWF rather than see it become what it has and it eventually leads to his ultimate departure from the Federation, only to have the very man who drove him there, Austin, take his place in the fight against his enemies.

Austin goes from a no-frills heel to someone who needs to find anyway to make it to the top, gets into a war with Bret that he can't win in the ring and thus snaps, steps up his war with Bret and eventually becomes Hart by taking his place in the promotion when Bret is driven out and taking up Bret's sword by inheriting his enemies.

Their feud took the entirety of Bret's WWF character and put things together. Bret the tag champion in the Hart Foundation was a heel who took shortcuts. He turns himself into a singles star and becomes a people's champ type, fighting for the fans and trying to symbolize substance over style. Bret-Austin is born out of Bret-HBK, where Hart is driven into near retirement by losing to the one person who stood for everything he was against in a match with an ending he considered questionable. Austin drew Bret back (after the disgruntled Bret named Austin as the wrestler he respected) to make a name for himself after his no-frills Ringmaster persona got him nowhere.

A lot of the feud was based on things in the ring. Bret lost to Michaels because he was unprepared for the overtime that he didn't expect. When he meets Austin in the ring, he beats him because he can control the situation and force Austin into situations that Austin can't get out of. Austin is forced to respond out of the ring, drawing Hart into situations that Bret can't control. It's what pushes Bret over the edge and forces him to revert to his old Hitman persona, taking the shorcuts he tried to move away from and its topped off symbolically when he reforms the Hart Foundation.

Austin and Bret continue to have their struggle for control, but Austin pushes Bret too far. Bret sees someone he claimed to respect become a madman, and Stone Cold actually gets cheered for it. He sees HBK and others continually get the best of him in incidents that remind him of the WM12 loss where he felt he was "screwed". Even while beating Austin in the ring, Austin turns Hart into everything he claimed to hate and Bret, now believing that even the fans have abandoned him, makes the decision to destroy what he can't have. It sets into motion the events that lead to him being ultimately ousted from the WWF he once tried to defend.

That's the storyline part - since Bret's real exit didn't allow for the final showdown in-ring, where Austin would finally find the control to beat Bret in a match, Stone Cold's character completed the run from maniac heel to top face. While Bret turned into what he fought against, Austin did the same and stepped into Bret's place and took up the fight against their mutual enemies. A year after losing to Bret at Wrestlemania and two years after Bret lost to HBK in the match that lead to his feud with Austin, Stone Cold defeats Michaels and sends him out of the WWF and then moves onto Vince McMahon in the battle for control that forced Bret out.

I don't know if they can ever put together anything like that again, where all the players move along their character arcs even when things take turns the bookers couldn't expect. It tied together Bret's entire WWF character history, culminated with two careers ending (Bret and Michaels), turned Vince into the ultimate heel and Austin into the ultimate anti-hero.

If they ever have a final episode of Raw, it needs to end with Bret and Austin standind over a beaten Vince, flipping him off and toasting Steveweisers. And then Bret attacks Austin from behind and does his evil smirk, because that's just the kind of guy he is.

So far we've established that Hogan and Piper had at least 2 big televised, main-event matches and at least one big, televised, tag-team main-event. Plus Piper was the lead heel and Hogan the lead face. Plus they (or at least Piper) was always talking poop about Hogan. This was 1984-85. That's what a great feud was back then. I mean, name someone else Hogan had two big, televised main-events with during his first title run in the WWF. I'm coming up with Andre, and that's about it.

I think Hogan vs Andre was great, even if the best part was Heenan's making fun of Hogan.

Rock vs Triple H- These two have been fighting each other for 5 years, and right now appear to FINALLY be on the same side of the face/heel spectrum for a significant ammount of time.

WWF vs WCW- No, silly, not the Alliance. I mean the peak of the Monday night wars. 1996-1999 was a great time to be a wrestling fan, if you're into the shock value aspect of it.

Steve Austin vs Vince McMahon- Best story ever told outside the ring. Mr. McMahon is evil, and he is the only McMahon I never get sick of.

Undertaker vs Steve Austin- Few people on the WWF roster today have a history like these two. Like Rock/HHH, these two have never really been on the same side (face or heel) for any significant time, and when they were (1998), they still fought each other. Undertaker hasn't stood a chance against Austin in years, though, even if he did beat him via a fast count at Over the Edge 1999.

Mick Foley vs Triple H- See Rock vs Triple H.

Ric Flair vs Sting- I can only think of a few examples even close to this one when it comes to one single match jumpstarting a wrestler's career.

Ric Flair vs Ricky Steamboat- Great, legendary matches.

Four Horsemen vs Dusty Rhodes- The horsemen were great against anyone, but this feud in particular stands out ain my memory.

I seen somebody brought up Masato Tanaka's name in the " Most Forgotten Finishers " thread , then that got me to thinking about his feud with Mike Awesome in ECW in 98 .That was a great feud ! I know they feuded a lot in Japan before that , which I never seen any of , but from what little I have read about it , it was pretty intense also . I really miss seeing those two go at it !

Foley/Helmsley: Hands down. No question. One great (Royal Rumble) and one good (No Way Out) match... great psychology... and above all THE RETURN OF CACTUS JACK!

Honorable mention:

-Hogan/Piper ("Would they have loved you so much if they hadn't hated me?" -Piper)-Rock/Jericho before Jericho went completely heel. I like the idea of two guys who are technically allies but can't stand each other.-Austin/McMahon: What can I say that hasn't been said already.-Savage/Warrior: I didn't see this first hand, but it sounds like I missed the best of one of my biggest guilty pleasures (the Warrior)-Kane/Pete Rose :)

Flair vs Steamboat - Good lord.. I just loved their matches. I mean, i remember being not even 10 years of age.. watching their 60 minutes 3 falls match, and was captivated the whole time. Just amazing...

Flair vs Sting - They always had great matches.. and even their final one, I was marking out so much.. it was so nostalgic... even though they had Flair tucking in a Nitro shirt into his underwear. Hogan vs Andre - This was around the time I first got into wrestling. It was just amazing, seeing these two go at it.. Perhaps it was the hype.. or how their characters just seemed like Superheroes.. it just really captured my imagination..